Okay, stop. Let's admit it: this is no glorious battle, but a grubby turf war in which the ability of a company's PR team to spread FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) about the other side is just as important as that company's ability to build a cutting-edge GPU. It's also an area in which software engineers work almost as hard to optimise drivers for key benchmarks as they do to make them run stably across the majority of 3D games.<br><br>

If anything, the reduction of combatants from many (Matrox, S3, Rendition, 3DLabs, 3dfx, PowerVR) to just two (Nvidia and ATi) has made the scrap even dirtier. As well as inspiring each company to create its best products, the war has panicked each into producing its worst. Normally, we celebrate the former - hot new chips, cool new features - but on this occasion, we focus our attention on the latter: poorly conceived products, vapourware and benchtest bungles that beggar belief. Welcome to the ATi and Nvidia hall of shame.

Nowadays, war between marketing departments demand for hell a lot more funding than say "engineering and research". As long as marketing folks could get a firm hold on what most people want to hear and try thru social influence from a few, the rests follow.

Let's not forget the 64-bit technology that is still starved by marketing years after AMD A64. In high tech industry, you can fool most of the people all the time.

The shame rests on those companies wasting good ideas from being poor business managers; and informed consumers suffer.